ManyPenny Press

September 27, 2009

As I Work on an Essay on Xerolage, an in-Progress Interview with mIEKAL aND

CHill: When Xerolage first appeared in the 1980s, there were
many small press magazines publishing visual poetry and xerox art--Kaldron, Photostatic, Lost & Found Times, Score, Generator, among them. Whatwould Xerolage add to that body of work?

MAnd: That's a long time back to remember but I should point out that the phrase visual poetry was not in such wide circulation in the early 80s & there were many, many ideas circulating about what follows concrete poetry. My own approach included prose, poetry, typography & visuals so I favored calling work my work & the work of others visual/verbal literature, a term that I liked because it seemed more inclusive than visual poetry. Xerolage comes out of wanting to make the space to focus on single author works that were created for a specific magazine format. One that was particularly easy to reproduce on a copier. So many things have been fit into that frame: copy art, mail art, collage, visual & concrete poetry, scores, found, graphism, conceptual.

CHill: Though the term visual
poetry indeed was not in wide circulation (not even in a wet dream at Poetry
Magazine), the above mags would have been using it. SCORE used the term in its
first issue, 1983. I agree that the term visual/verbal literature
works is inclusive of visual poetry, and thus
also including prose with visuals as well, e.g. your "Erotic
Logic" and much of Michael Helsem's work.

Some Qs bouncing
off your answer above: Mail art may have been at its peak in the 1980s,
projects including all that you mentioned above for Xerolage--copy art,
collage, visual/concrete poetry, scores, found art, and conceptual art--How did
you see Xerolage speaking to, interacting with, mail art? What was Xerolage
attempting to do that mail art was not doing? Or, what do you want to do more
of that mail art was doing?

mIEKAL: In the 80s one didn't have to seek mail art out, it
just appeared at the door, solicited, unsolicited, surprising & not.
Even back then there were 2 streams as far as I was concerned. One
stream was the garbage in garbage out school, mostly recycling images of
popular media such as Reagan, Nixon etc & I have always found that work
wearisome. The other stream was a fascinating network of artist / poets mostly
working in isolation, many of them from eastern bloc countries, who had to
devise ways to even get their mail out of the country. While a lot of
this work was piggybacked on the Fluxus movement, it was remarkably fresh &
alive (I'll avoid the use of the word original), constantly changing &
growing, & in my mind consciously created for the network of viewers who
were receiving these packages. In that sense, the work was offered, not
to a random audience, but to an energetic collective of like-minds, many whom
are still in contact with each other 30 years later. So while the content
was / is always important to me, the mode of transmission lent an air of
person-to-person value. When the internet came along, a lot of mail
art stopped being interesting in the same way, because suddenly there was a
whole new way to get one's work around. It has always been a little
mysterious to me that it took so many folks 10-15 years to make that switch.

Xerolage has never been identified with movements or genres
as such. It has always been about creating a frame to see the work of
single artists alongside of some sense of who they are as a person, because I
have always believed the person & the work go hand-in-hand. I also
have been committed to questioning what visual poetry can be by selecting work
& artists that would never think of themselves as visual poets yet their
work navigates the same proximity.

Chill: I’m intrigued by your statement that you believe the
person and the work go hand-in-hand. Tell me more? How does the person and the
work go hand-in-hand in a Xerolage issue such as Vittore Baroni’s “Sangue
Misto” (Xerolage 7) or Greg Evason in his issue (Xerolage 12).

Awaiting an answer from mIEKAL.

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